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May162015

Transient forgiving, the Holy Spirit enfolding

Moved into new home. All is good. It truly is a home, manly, a good change. Dinner with Carter, his future son-in-law and female acquaintance. Everyone contributes. A gourmet grocery store just a half block away allows me to supply fresh baked bread, potato salad, pickled beets, and manchego cheese. A slow cooked pork roast centers the meal. Pleasant adult conversation, comfortable at the onset. I like the neighborhood: hip urban, cultured, intellectual, and artsy, considering poetry and prose reading—not sure, a reduction of identity through an intensified prayer life demands that the contemplative life remains forefront. Everything points toward my religious life or abandonment is the case. Things pursued dictate detachment. I know I want to start painting, watercolors–capturing an image of Mary that lingers; whispering blue, shadowy, indistinct and melding, a hand extending—toying with colors and white backdrop. I feel it is important to distinguish the attribute regarding boarding with Carter that contentedly fits perfect. Complacent distance the knowledgeable identification. We share similar profound interests: Christianity, recovery, literature, coffee, and sports, yet we speak sparingly. The lack of words appropriate, mature. A prayer before dinner, a mentioning of catering Father Sam’s eighty-third birthday party tomorrow; nothing distinct, nor too much detail. Dinner conversation is light-hearted, friendly and unassuming. We eat on the porch, neighbors near enjoying the warm weather, sidewalk strollers sauntering by. Carter is a reserved man, obviously intelligent, handsome to a striking degree. I teased him when I saw a photo of him when he was in his twenties, poking at him how good looking he was. He chuckles, proud, not falsely humble, receiving a compliment, while simply humble—overall serious, trying to figure out my sense of humor. His future son-in-law is an energetic young man who seems excited about me sharing the home. A school teacher, he is knowledgeable regarding jazz music, all types of music. He genuinely possesses a zest for life. The female acquaintance, a respectful intimate of Carter’s, a registered nurse, fortifies the overall erudite ambiance. The environment suits splendidly. I cautiously reduce my AA interaction based upon a weariness with too much talking, too much sharing, and too many people willing to throw themselves, as master or salve, onto others. Socially, I know, for myself, AA is limited. Avoiding rebellion or the forcing of matters, AA can never be more than a means, within a greater whole, to sobriety. Nothing more, never a way of life. Accepting things through proper identification is important for healthy psychological growth, and therefore contemplative growth. Things are what they are, acceptance and working within order is the demand. Tomorrow a cookout with my basketball friends at one of the gentlemen’s ranch, horses and good company. That is proper socializing, again within a greater whole. I know the AA message. I embrace the message, grateful for its ability to assist. I move forward with confidence, able to properly discern, willing to become the man God envisions. The Holy Spirit has become such a central focus, an intimate furthering of my prayer life. Easter season moves forward. The Assumption of Christ into heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father, the Paraclete left behind–kindles.  The Church guided by Mary: mothers, comforts, and shelters. The Trinity is good, loving, and providing. I am tired.

Virtues are formed by prayer. Prayer preserves temperance. Prayer suppresses anger. Prayer prevents emotions of pride and envy. Prayer draws into the soul the Holy Spirit, and raises man to Heaven. — St. Ephraim

Clipping T.S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’, pondering images and thoughts reflecting the Holy Spirit.

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire

 

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Mar252015

More pieces from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable-
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

Church Bells ringing

–Sweet unction: dedicated to Ann Marie Najjar

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Mar242015

Four Quartets (excerpt) T.S. Eliot

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

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Mar022015

T.S. Eliot more of the ‘Four Quartets’

III

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away-
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing-
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstacy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

shutterstock_Darkness-in-a-theater

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